is weathered to a yellowish color; while the drift from the northeast has a lighter gray color and is more or less tinted with red. These colors are due to the condition of the iron present, which in its protoxide combinations imparts a bluish hue, in the condition of limonite yellow, and as hematite red. It exists under the first of these conditions in the Cretaceous clays and shales which have contributed probably more than half of the material of the western drift; and as hematite it colors the red shales and sandstones about Lake Superior and the drift derived from them. The northeastern drift in Stearns county, however, does not usually show the reddish tint conspicuously, because it has become mingled with much material from other rock-formations in its long transportation. The morainic hills one to six miles west and northwest from Cold Spring consist of this northwestern drift, and the same forms the surface thence northeast to St. Cloud and Le Sauk and onward all the way to Lake Superior.
Remarkable changes took place in the currents of the ice-sheet during its departure. The ice from the northwest and west becoming relatively thicker, pushed back that from the northeast upon a large area reaching from the southeast part of this county east-northeastward to the Snake and St. Croix rivers, even advancing into the edge of Wisconsin. After this western ice-lobe began to retreat, the line at which it first halted or perhaps re-advanced, is marked by the morainic accumulations, referred to the time of the fifth of Elysian moraine. The continuation of this morainic series in Stearns county forms the belt of knolly and hilly till east, south and west of the plain of modified drift in Maine Prairie. The angle made in the glacial boundary by the confluence of the western and eastern ice-fields was probably at or near the southeast corner of Wakefield, where the most prominent morainic hills in this county are found. on the south margin of the northeastern ice at this time was apparently accumulated the hilly till of Rockville, of the south half of St. Joseph, excepting in sections 31, 30 and 19, and of the southeast part of St. Cloud, the continuance of this series being through northern Haven and Palmer in Sherburne county. the Gravel and sand forming the plain of Maine Prairie were deposited by the waters that had flowed down from the slopes of the adjacent ice-fields, which converged toward this area.
By the next retreat of the waning ice-sheet its boundary was carried back to the sixth or Waconia moraine, which is represented in southern Stearns county by the drift hills and knolls on the east and north border of Luxemburg, along the line of Eden Lake and Munson, and thence southwest through Paynesville to Cape Bad Luck in Roseville, Kandiyohi county, accumulated along the north margin of the western ice-lobe. The south line of the ice moving from the northeast and north seems to have extended at this time along the northwest side of the Watab river in St. Wendel and St. Joseph, and thence westward through Collegeville, Farming, St. Martin and Spring Hill, Grove, Getty and Raymond. When the recession from the Elysian moraine began, the outlet of drainage from the confluent ice-fields appears to have been from Cold Spring northeast to the Watab river and St. Joseph, along the valley occupied by modified drift which has been before described.
